Shaun Leane: Remembering Fierce Designs and Pheasant Claws

The Eagle Talon earrings in Shaun Leane's new collection were inspired by the necklace of pheasant claws and pearls he once made for a McQueen catwalk show.

LONDON — For Shaun Leane, the “Savage Beauty” exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has been both bittersweet and inspiring — a chance to reminisce about his creative relationship with the fashion designer Alexander McQueen and an opportunity to introduce two jewelry collections as an homage to their collaboration.

Over coffee recently at Berners Tavern in the London Edition hotel, Mr. Leane said that digging through his archives for “Savage Beauty” items had been akin to finding old family photographs in an attic trunk. “It was very emotional but also very beautiful, because each of them is like a landmark in my 23-year friendship and my 15-year working relationship with Lee,” he said, referring to the designer by his first name. “They all have a date and a memory.”

So do his new designs. The pendants, rings, earrings and bracelets of the Quill collection, for example, were inspired in part by the coiled corset of aluminum that Mr. Leane created for Mr. McQueen’s fall 1999 catwalk show, “The Overlook.”

“When I looked at the early pieces from the 1990s, there was a real energy to them,” Mr. Leane said. “He was going from one extreme to another with his tailoring background. These items were fierce, which was a word we used a lot in the ’90s.”

One of his biggest challenges with Mr. McQueen led to a design in the five-piece Reflective Series: earrings of pheasant claws grasping pearls.

To make a necklace for the fall 2001 “What a Merry Go Round” show, “I was delivered a bin bag of 100 pheasant’s claws to hold these Tahitian pearls. I had to teach myself taxidermy,” Mr. Leane recalled. “I wired them all up into position and cured them in beds of salts for weeks in my mom’s cupboards.

“Her cleaner at the time opened these trays and thought we were practicing voodoo. She ran for the hills and never came back. So we nicknamed it the voodoo necklace.”

It’s such stories that Mr. Leane hopes are reflected not only in “Savage Beauty” (through Aug. 2), but in his new designs, sold online and at retailers throughout Britain, as well as in Continental Europe, the Middle East and the United States.

“I wanted to capture the essence of those catwalk pieces and sort of distill them down to something that could be worn away from the catwalk,” he said. “People can still have that energy and own a piece of the story.”